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Google's calendar API stays open for everyone

Google has announced that it will not go ahead with its earlier plans to restrict API access to its Calendar product to registered developers. Access through the CalDAV protocol will stay open for everyone, says Google Tech Lead Piotr Stanczyk in the company's Developers Blog. "We received many requests for access to CalDAV, giving us a better understanding of developers' use cases and causing us to revisit that decision," Stanczyk says.

Google had announced in March that it would offer CalDAV only to registered developers, causing a number of users to complain that the company was leaving open standards behind step by step. CalDAV is used to sync services like Google Calendar with other calendaring tools, be they web applications or native clients. The company was planning to only give access to developers who applied to use the CalDAV protocol, adding them to a whitelist, and may have reversed its decision because the number of requests it received reached a level that would have made it difficult to effectively manage.

In its announcement, the company also said that it will make CardDAV, an open standard for exchanging contact information, available for all users. Both CalDAV and CardDAV have been integrated with Google's API Console and are now able to use OAuth 2.0 authentication across Google's services.